Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore Survivor Luxury Watch Review

Watchuwant is now WatchBox! Subscribe for the best luxury watch content. The 1,000-piece limited edition Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore Survivor was a watch for its times. Launched into the maelstrom of the 2008 global financial crisis, the 42mm black titanium Survivor was both a child of late '00s economic exuberance and nightmarish microcosm of a world gone made. Laden with weapons imagery and designed for post apocalyptic "active life-stylers" (e.g., Highway Warriors), the Royal Oak Offshore remains the most controversial Audemars Piguet ever offered. 2008 was the year everything blew up. Lehman Brothers. Bear Sterns. Wall Street. Detroit. Like the crisis itself, the Royal Oak Offshore Survivor was launched in a series of disparate introductions outside the traditional SIHH/Baselworld watch industry trade shows. More than the latest in a seemingly unending succession of AP Royal Oak Offshore limited Editions, the Survivor has proved to a high water mark for that trend: a strident statement of brash style that AP would never surpass. Between 2003, when AP launched the 48mm Royal Oak Offshore T3, to 2011, when another Schwarzenegger "48," the "Legacy," effectively ended the run, Royal Oak Offshore limited series became a breeding ground for experimentation and outright excess in Le Brassus, Switzerland. But the 2008 Survivor topped them all, and it remains AP's reigning champion of wicked whimsey to this day. Although nominally 42mm in diameter, the dystopic imagery